Appendix C. A brief history of Swift
Where did Swift come from, and where is it going? This appendix aims to answer both of these questions. To fully appreciate Swift’s purpose requires understanding the ecosystem that it emerged from. Swift is a young language, but it incorporates many old ideas.
Warning
This appendix is not meant to provide reference-quality material. It contains speculation, suppositions, and opinion.
Swift contains all of the features that have become standard in class-based, object-oriented programming languages. These are features like objects, inheritance, polymorphism, and many more that are exposed when you build using the class reference semantics in Swift. Object-oriented programming languages can trace their history to at least as far back as Simula 67 from 1967, and they were influenced by ideas from even earlier languages, like Lisp (1958). Simula 67 was not a particularly widely used language, but its ideas emerged in popular programming languages of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.